The file”.mov” is missing?? Can I recover it from somewhere on hard drive?

I was not familiar with movie maker and just downloaded my movies off the sd card into a project thinking that it would save it as is to hard drive. I was worried about this and kept making sure I was able to access the project for weeks after I started it. Now the movies are missing from project. When I open project it shows the footage footprint with time duration but no footage. When I try to "fix it" the path points to the external drive where I originally uploaded the videos from. Does any one have any ideas or ran into this problem? Thanks